


Nightmares

by shauds



Series: Comfortember2020 [3]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Blue Devil (DCU Comics), DCU (Comics), Deathstroke the Terminator (Comics), Red Hood and the Outlaws (Comics)
Genre: Comfortember, DC Comics Rebirth, Gen, Nightmares, Post-Heroes in Crisis (DCU), no editing we die like our love of cannon, outlaws dream team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-03
Updated: 2020-11-03
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:01:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27366988
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shauds/pseuds/shauds
Summary: "I was in Hell for a year, but I'm still having nightmares about something that didn't even last a second."Jason and Rose may have rescued Eddie from Hell, but that's far from the only bad thing to have ever happened to them. Dying isn't an easy thing to get over, and as much as Eddie tries not to think about it during the day, he has less control over what happens in his dream.His new friends do their best to help him through it.
Relationships: Eddie Bloomberg & Jason Todd, Eddie Bloomberg & Jason Todd & Rose Wilson, Eddie Bloomberg & Rose Wilson, Jason Todd & Rose Wilson
Series: Comfortember2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1993963
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34
Collections: Comfortember 2020





	Nightmares

_He was in the fields again. The grass was long, the sun bright, but not **too** bright, other heroes, most of them a wearing the robes and masks that hid their identities, older than Eddie too, with more to lose. No need for him to wear a mask like that, he'd never tried to hide his identity; not that it would have made much of a difference if it had._

_Not today. Today was bright and clear, the air smelled the grass he was wondering through. The mornings talk at nothing session hadn't felt as weird as every session before that had. It was good. Today was a good day. No, Eddie decided as dropped to the ground, looking up at the endless sky, today was going to be a **great** day. _

_Today was gone…_

*******

It takes a while, as it always does for Eddie to notice the screaming, even longer to realize that he's the one doing the screaming. On that day, there'd been no time for screaming, no time for him to process what had happened. Most night that helps ground him, reminds him of where he is now. Tonight isn't most nights.

Helpless, that was how it had made him feel. Either soon or a very **very** long time after, that helplessness was replaced wholly by terror, then returned bit by bit to chip away at him until there was nothing left. Until he was the dazed, hollowed out **thing** Rose and Jason had dug up and made coherent.

A crash rings out, even louder than the screams and there's a weight wrapped around his chest, it grows tighter and tighter, lifts him up to hold him securely in place, he's pressed against something warm, soft but strong, **Listen**!" _ba-dum, ba-dum, ba dum…_ A steady rhythm. Eddie feels helpless now too.

"Shhh." Again a soft voice, again hands running through his hair, massaging gentle circles in his neck while someone hums a cheery tune, the sound sending vibrations through the mass Eddie lay against.

They're all back.

Screaming gives way to sobbing and Eddie used the freedom he gets from Jason's loosening hold to bury his face in his friend's chest, ruining a third shirt in as many nights with the proof of how much weaker he is than them.

Rose continues to shush and pet him as if he's the little girl she used to take care of back in a world the rest of them can barely remember.

"I'm sorry," Eddie says between wails, "I'm sorry." He was supposed to get better, he was supposed to **be** better by now. They're fine, they're strong and tough and always able to help while Eddie's still stuck right where they'd gone through literal Hell to find him.

"Don't be." Jason says, his speech slurred just enough that Eddie can tell he's exhausted, he stops just short of yawning. "S'okay, was dreamin' about a scary fucking elephant, had **ears**."

"Clocks." Rose offers up, "So many clocks, do you want to tell us about yours?" Rose asks, so much softer then she normally is, that iron-tinged lilt to her voice all but gone.

Eddie shakes his head, he doesn't **want** to, he wants it to not have happened, he wants to stop thinking that it never stopped happening, wants it be **over**.

"I was in Hell for a year," Eddie sniffs, the mortification of what he's done, **again** slamming into him like Shockwave on a rampage, "and I'm still have nightmares about something that didn't even last a second. And then I gotta go wake up everyone else 'cause I can't shut up about it either." And he should untangle himself from Jason's hold, smile and tell them both that he's fine and they should get back to bed, but he can't to that either

"Eddie," Rose says, still in that calm, soft tone she barely uses on anyone but him, he's not sure he can handle it. "You can't help what you dream about."

"You can." He throws back, it's childish and he knows it's childish, but he's so tired it's hard to care about anything else.

Jason snorts, tucks his head to try and hide it, but it's too late, and Rose huffs at him. "Sorry, I'm just thinking how **nice** it would be to never see another clown in my sleep again?"

"Ha!" She barks out a short laugh, her fingers tracing at the edges of her eye patch. "The dream."

"God, imagine **dreaming**." Jason continues."Sounds like fun, huh?" He leans over to look at Eddie, and while he's not smiling, nothing on his face would give away that he's anything but relaxed, he's still tapping out a metronome on Eddie's shoulder, he can't hide the tension he's holding in the rest of his body with how closely it's pressed against Eddie's.

"I can't believe I used to be the most dramatic friend." Eddie sniffs and scrubs his crusty eyes, "You should both go into showbiz."

"Yeah, how many job openings you think there are for pirates?" Rose rolls her eye.

"Or you could be a cyclops." Jason nods seriously. "Sure there's a horror movie somewhere that'll take you."

"Yeah, and you'll be a zombie, I'd say we could have the production staff bash you over the head a couple times for authenticity, but that wouldn't change much." Rose muses, her head cocked ever so slightly.

"You're both the worst." Eddie intoned mournfully, burying his face in his hands. "How did I get stuck here?"

"Says the demon." Rose huffed as if he'd offended her beyond belief.

And it clicks what they're doing, a vague memory from that before time that never really happened to him; reading a letter written on car patterned stationary detailing the new techniques for calming panicking victims it's writer had learned. Balanced on a stool in a kitchen lit only by the light coming from his own supernatural body while he listened to a teary recounting of a little girl who'd needed bedtime stories to sleep when her daddy wasn't home on time… Soothing him hadn't worked, so now they're trying to distract him with another petty argument between themselves, hoping it will work to distract him by getting him involved.

"Actually in some mythology's demon's aren't so bad." Jason's voice rumbled out from behind Eddie.

"Tell that to the ones who tried to bite your head off." Rose dropped so she was lying across the foot of Eddie's bed, her arms thrown over the side. "We're not talking about mythology here."

"Are you gonna try and bite my head off, Eddie?" Jason asks his with all seriousness.

"No," Eddie voice cracks when he says it, his throat too tight to make even that single word come out normally, he takes what he hopes will be a steadying breath before he continues, "I wouldn't eat something that's been dead that long."

Jason's gasp only solidifies Eddie's point about Jason at lest going into showbiz, something along the line of a soap opera would probably suit him well. "You've corrupted him!" He jabs an accusatory finger at Rose.

"What do you mean **I** corrupted him? He's always been this way." She smacks the finger away from her.

"No he hasn't, he was an angel when we found him," from what they'd said, Eddie had tried to claw Jason's face off when they'd first found him.

"He's a demon!"

"You're a demon."

They build up to another made up argument, moving from topic to topic, each one less justified than the last, until they're complaining about whether Jason should change his color to green, because they're already have Eddie for red, and he was here here first. By that point, Eddie's only half listening, slipping in and out of wakefulness with their voices drowning out the rush of the wind and the heat seeping from their body's overwhelming that seconds worth of agony that returned so often to haunt him.

This isn't the last nightmare he'll have, not by a long shot, and he's not going to try and pretend it doesn't matter, that it's not a sleep deprivation inducing annoyance of the highest degree. But Rose is right, nothing he can do is going to stop them, and as bad as they are, when he wakes up, it's to this; his friends holding on to him, imperfect and undemanding, not caring that he can't be perfect either. When waking up is so close to a dream, what does it matter that the ones he has when he falls asleep are bad. Maybe one day, he'll be able to joke about them too.


End file.
